If you are familiar with the BBC Ten Pieces, you will enjoy this KS2 Music quiz about the Russian composer, Modest Mussorgsky.
Mussorgsky was a lover of Russian culture, including its folklore and its music, and his works have a uniquely Russian identity. Many of his pieces, like Night on Bare Mountain for example, were based on Russian history or legend. Along with Balakirev, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin, Mussorgsky was one of a group of composers who became known as ‘The Five’ or 'The Mighty Handful'.
His parents may have had him baptised as 'Modest', yet Mussorgsky went on to write some towering music! What do you know about the man and his work? Try this quiz and find out.
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You can find more about this topic by visiting BBC - KS2: Modest Mussorgsky - A Night on the Bare Mountain
This was obviously going to be helpful, whether through 'nature or nurture'!
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... Not quite up there with Mozart, but hardly a slouchy start. Could you play a piano concerto before your 10th birthday?
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This was then Russia's capital, with its warm-water access down into Europe through the Baltic Sea
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The others of The Five are all there in our list, but Borodin was the one on this occasion. Try listening to his infectiously tuneful Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor, for instance ...
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Some of his bosses did what they could to send him on postings where he could also give concert performances
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Sadly, there is an alarming portrait on Wikipedia's page about Mussorgsky, painted barely a week before his early death aged only 42. His particular 'demons' seem to have come from within, rather than the encroaching blindness or deafness of several other composers. For the record, Answer 4 is a complete red-herring as Mussorgsky never married
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Among the suite's quieter movements is The Old Castle, in whose original picture (fairly easily imagined) a lone minstrel is playing in the sunset below the castle walls: Ravel brilliantly gives this plaintive tune to the saxophone
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Answer 1 was the work of Tchaikovsky, and Answer 2 by Janacek; Pavlov (Ans.4) was a psychologist, but at least he worked (later) in the same hospital where the encounter in our Q.4 had occurred
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So sad! For collectors of such details of the famous, there may be worse elsewhere ...
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... So, at time of writing (spring 2015), it is 150 years or thereabouts since he began it. Very sadly he never actually heard it performed in his lifetime, but these days you can experience it 'live' or in recorded form at the touch of a couple of buttons. Enjoy!
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